Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Institute of Physics continues to urge a moratorium

25.01.2008

On Monday, January 21, the Institute of Physics (IOP) attended the oral evidence session for the Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee’s Inquiry into the Science Budget Allocations. In its evidence, the Institute’s key recommendation was a moratorium on proposed cuts to physics programmes, until the Wakeham Review on the health of physics has reported.

The £80 million shortfall in the Science and Technology Facilities (STFC) budget has resulted in a delivery plan that will lead to job losses at universities and three leading research laboratories; a cut in university research grants; and withdrawal from a number of high-profile programmes such as the International Linear Collider and the Southern Hemisphere Observatory’s Gemini Telescope.

Professor Peter Main, director of education and science at IOP, Professor Michael Rowan Robinson, President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Tony Bell, national secretary for Prospect, the trade union which represents many of the concerned physicists, presented evidence together to the Committee which was chaired by Phil Willis MP.

Shortly after the evidence session, Professor Peter Main explained, “A number of major decisions were made with very little notice which is why the delivery plan has caused such an outcry. We are calling for a more considered approach. We want the Wakeham Review to explicitly take this issue into consideration and be given time to feed back to government before irreversible damage is done.”

In the second evidence session, Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of STFC, and Professor Ian Diamond, chair of Research Councils UK, explained that STFC’s settlement was generous considering the current economic climate and maintained that decisions to cut specific programmes had been made with the appropriate level of consultation.

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Whether you call it effervescent, fizzy, or sparkling, carbonated water is making a comeback as a beverage. Aside from quenching thirst, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have discovered a new use for these "bubbly" concoctions that will have major impact on the manufacturer of the world's thinnest, flattest, and one most useful materials -- graphene.

As graphene's popularity grows as an advanced "wonder" material, the speed and quality at which it can be manufactured will be paramount. With that in mind,...

Physicists at the University of Bonn have managed to create optical hollows and more complex patterns into which the light of a Bose-Einstein condensate flows. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new generation of computers. The researchers are now presenting their results in the journal Nature Photonics.

Light particles (photons) occur as tiny, indivisible portions. Many thousands of these light portions can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are...

For the first time, scientists have shown that circular RNA is linked to brain function. When a RNA molecule called Cdr1as was deleted from the genome of mice, the animals had problems filtering out unnecessary information – like patients suffering from neuropsychiatric disorders.

While hundreds of circular RNAs (circRNAs) are abundant in mammalian brains, one big question has remained unanswered: What are they actually good for? In the...

A study led by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg presents evidence of the coexistence of superconductivity and “charge-density-waves” in compounds of the poorly-studied family of bismuthates. This observation opens up new perspectives for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity, a topic which is at the core of condensed matter research since more than 30 years. The paper by Nicoletti et al has been published in the PNAS.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, superconductivity had been observed in some metals at temperatures only a few degrees above the absolute zero (minus...